Your Client’s Case Is Settled. They Still Can’t Get Paid.

Hey subscriber,

On this week’s episode, I sat down with Michelle Prince, Founder & CCO of Lit Pro, a healthcare lien resolution company serving mass tort law firms. Michelle practiced law in North Carolina before moving into settlement administration and legal technology, and about ten years ago she and two colleagues saw an opportunity to bring modern technology and genuine client service into a space that had neither.

The reason I wanted to have Michelle on is one that doesn’t get talked about enough in legal marketing circles: lien resolution is a brand problem. A client can have a great intake experience, a great legal team, and a favorable settlement, and still walk away unhappy because the final step took too long and nobody explained why. That experience affects referrals, reviews, and reputation. This conversation is about what actually happens in that last mile and why it matters more than most firms account for.

For anyone outside the litigation world, here’s the plain-English version. When a client settles a case, the health insurers that paid for their injury-related care have a legal right to be reimbursed from that settlement before the client receives a dollar. Medicare, Medicaid across fifty different state programs, private insurers, military coverage, Indian health services. Any combination of these can be in play on a single case.

Understanding which liens apply, negotiating them down, confirming compliance with state and federal law, and getting the final numbers right is the lien resolution process. Done well, it moves fast and the client barely notices it. Done poorly, or handed to the wrong vendor, it can delay settlement for months or years. And clients who have already waited years for a settlement do not handle additional unexplained delays well.

Michelle’s framing for why this matters beyond the legal obligation: reputation and revenue. The firm wants to get paid. The funder wants to get paid. The client has been waiting, sometimes for decades. Time is money on every side of that table, and the lien resolution vendor is the last party standing between all of them and a closed case. 

Lit Pro built its proprietary system, the Lit Portal, as the operational engine behind everything they do. Program managers are kept on task through it, clients get a real-time view of where their litigation stands, and paralegals can log in and see exactly where any individual claimant’s lien resolution process is, down to expected timelines and outstanding documentation.

The patented piece is the auditor itself. Lit Pro spent years manually reviewing millions of lines of claims, determining line by line whether each item was related to the injury at issue. That accumulated judgment was ingested into a closed AI system that now runs those determinations at scale. It gets smarter with every case it processes, and all of it stays inside Lit Pro’s walls. Nothing goes out.

Michelle made a point about transparency that stood out. The portal shows clients how the audits are actually being done. She doesn’t believe any other vendor in the space does that. For firms that have historically viewed lien resolution as a black box where cases go in and money eventually comes out, that level of visibility changes the relationship entirely. 

Michelle shared a result they reported to clients the week we recorded. Lit Pro was brought in to assist with the Boy Scouts of America bankruptcy lien administration program by a number of firms that had opted out of the trustee-selected vendor. The reason for the opt-out: dissatisfaction with communication, service, and the resolution approach.

Lit Pro has been working thousands of those cases for roughly a year. The result they reported: an average lien reduction of 99%, translating to approximately $72,000 per claimant returned to people who had been sexually abused and were already receiving far less in settlement than they should have.

These are cases where Lit Pro is dealing with individual associations one at a time, each requiring its own negotiation. There is no shortcut. The result comes from diligent auditing, applying the law, applying the facts, and fighting the fight on every single file. Michelle said she couldn’t be prouder of that outcome. I understand why.

Michelle’s answer to the most overused word in legal tech right now: AI. And she didn’t just name it. She flagged the specific risk that almost nobody in the legal conference circuit is asking about.

Lit Pro’s VP of technology came from the financial world and started attending legal tech conferences. He was asking vendors hard questions: where is the data going, who is receiving it, who is analyzing it. In most cases, the vendors either didn’t know or the answer was that it was open, meaning healthcare data and legal data was flowing out into systems that weren’t secured or controlled.

Lit Pro’s AI is closed. Built on their own manual auditing work. Fed only by their own cases. Nothing leaves. Michelle’s warning to every firm working with a vendor that uses AI: ask those questions before you sign. Where is your client’s data going? Who has access to it? The answers are going to matter a great deal more in the coming years than they do right now.

A few quick ones to close:

Biggest misconception lawyers have about liens: that all lien resolution companies are the same. Michelle hears it constantly. Firms that have had bad experiences with slow, uncommunicative vendors assume the category is uniformly bad. It isn’t, but the bar is low enough that the assumption is understandable.

One thing a firm could do tomorrow to speed up every distribution: collect health insurance information early and accurately. Most mass tort intake processes avoid the lien conversation because it can feel like a deterrent. But collecting the right documentation and insurance history at intake is what allows the lien resolution process to move fast once settlement is reached.

Question a firm should ask a vendor but never does: who owns you? Outside investors, funding arrangements, and outside influence can all affect how a vendor prioritizes your clients. Lit Pro is owned entirely by Michelle and her co-founder Sherry. No outside money. No conflicting obligations.

I brought Michelle on because lien resolution is the part of the client journey that marketing almost never touches, and yet it directly affects the two things marketing is supposed to protect: reputation and revenue. A client who had a great experience with the legal team but a confusing, delayed settlement process is not going to refer anyone. They may not leave a good review. They may not remember the firm fondly at all.

The firms that understand this treat lien resolution the same way they treat intake. With structure, with communication, with someone accountable for how the client experience is going at that stage. The ones that hand it off and forget about it are leaving the last impression of a multi-year relationship to a vendor they’ve never evaluated.

Talk soon,

Al

P.S. The full conversation with Michelle is live now. She goes deeper on the data management and API integration piece, what it was like to lose a co-founder mid-build and keep going, and why she recommends a Spotify playlist as Lit Pro’s most underrated marketing channel. Worth the listen.

Get in touch.

Have a legal marketing question? Want to be a guest on the podcast? We’d love to hear from you. Reach out at www.pmpmg.com/podcast or connect with Al directly on LinkedIn.